{"product_id":"charlemagne-isbn-9780307274809","title":"Charlemagne","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAn incisive and absorbing biography of the legendary emperor who bridged ancient and  modern Europe and singlehandedly altered the course of Western history. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCharlemagne  was an extraordinary figure: an ingenious military strategist, a wise but ruthless  leader, a cunning politician, and a devout believer who ensured the survival of Christianity  in the West.  He also believed himself above the rules of the church, siring bastards  across Europe and coldly ordering the execution of 4,500 prisoners. Derek Wilson  shows how this complicated, fascinating man married the military might of his army  to the spiritual force of the Church in Rome, thereby forging Western Christendom.  This is a remarkable portrait of Charlemagne and of the intricate political, religious,  and cultural world he dominated.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePraise for Derek Wilson's \u003ci\u003eCharlemagne\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Wilson interrelates the personal and political. . . with an effectiveness that few  other biographers have matched.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Telegraph\u003c\/i\u003e (London)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Fast-paced. . . . Wilson deftly  chronicles Charlemagne's military exploits, political intrigues and religious devotion.” —\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Masterful and lively. . . . [Wilson] writes with great conviction  and a breathtaking attention to the kind of personal detail that makes his books  such compelling reading.” —Alison Weir, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Six Wives of Henry VIII\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Brilliant. . . . An utterly captivating and exquisitely written narrative about the rise and fall of the Carolingian empire. . . . \u003ci\u003eCharlemagne\u003c\/i\u003e is also a timely and provocative essay about the idea of Europe.” —Donald Yerxa, editor at \u003ci\u003e\u003ci\u003eHistorically Speaking\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eDerek Wilson graduated from Cambridge in 1961.  He spent several years traveling and teaching in Africa before becoming a full-time writer and broadcaster. His bestselling and award-winning books include \u003ci\u003eRothschild: A Story of Wealth and Power\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eHans Holbein: Portrait of an Unknown Man\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eTudor Tapestry: Men, Women and Society in Reformation England\u003c\/i\u003e. He has also written and presented numerous radio and television programs. Wilson is married and lives in Devon, England.CHAPTER 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eInheritance\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe pitched there a tent and was waiting in prayer the arrival of the new  converts when, behold! instead of friends, a band of enraged infidels  appeared on the plains all in arms and, coming up, rushed into his tent. The  servants that were with the holy martyr were for defending his life by  fighting; but he would not suffer it, declaring that the day he had long  waited for was come, which was to bring him to the eternal joys of the Lord.  He encouraged the rest to meet with cheerfulness and constancy a death which  was to them the gate of everlasting life.(1)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat account of the death of Boniface, the \"Apostle of Germany,\" in June 754  is important because it marks a turning point in world history. It is also  useful as a launchpad for this book because it may help us to get into the  right frame of mind to approach the life and times of Charles the Great.  Professor Barraclough succinctly observed, \"Without Boniface there could  have been no Charles\"(2) and that is a truth that we in the laid-back,  agnostic, twenty-first-century West should not lose sight of. If we find it  difficult to understand the mentality of Islamic suicide bombers and tend to  be dismissive of all fundamentalisms, then our imaginations need to be  jolted so that we can place ourselves alongside the warriors, scholars and  missionaries who created and led the first western empire. They were men who  believed simply, felt passionately, saw complex issues in black and white,  were aggressive in word and deed and understood this world as but a shadow  of a greater reality. And it was because they were the men they were--heroes  in every sense of the word--that they turned the tide of events, took hold  of a culture that seemed doomed to extermination by superior forces and  forged the civilization of which we are the heirs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Carolingian prince who would become Charlemagne was only twelve years  old when the venerable English missionary, Boniface, went to his death in  what is now Holland, but he knew Boniface and the septuagenarian's martyrdom  will have made its impact on the boy. Boniface had been a very important  figure in the life of Charlemagne's family, a bold, uncompromising religious  hero and a Carolingian supporter who inspired gratitude and awe. This  bustling, no-nonsense ecclesiastic towered over church life north of the  Alps and it was he who legitimized the coup that established Charles' father  as the progenitor of a new sovereign dynasty in Francia.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrankish dominance in the area west of the Rhine had been established by  Clovis in the fifth century, and his descendants of the Merovingian ruling  house had pushed their boundaries ever farther. But, in the way of  hereditary dynasties, enjoyment of power gradually took the place of  effective exercise of power. Successive rulers relied increasingly on their  leading court officials, the mayors of the palace, to fight their wars and  administer their lands. In 750, the reigning mayor, Pepin III (Pepin the  Short), decided to bring this unsatisfactory situation to an end. But,  instead of simply seizing power and disposing of Childeric III, the last  Merovingian, he sought papal authentication for his usurpation. He sent Rome  a message as brief as it was pregnant with significance: \"Is it wise to have  kings who have no power or control?\" Pope Zacharias, who had his own reasons  for wishing to oblige Pepin, concluded that it was not wise. Armed with the  permission of God's representative on earth, Pepin bundled Childeric off to  a monastery where he lived out his days, while Pepin himself was anointed  King of the Franks. The man deputed to officiate at this ceremony on  Zacharias' behalf was Boniface. It was the forging of this unique bond  between the spiritual and terrestrial powers that was to form the basis of  what became the Holy Roman Empire. More important, the creation of a  religious and civil infrastructure--neither theocracy nor secular  state--made possible whatever it is that we call \"Europe.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOnly in the closing years of his reign did Charlemagne and his  contemporaries begin to think of themselves as Europeans, and any notion  they had of a newly emerging cultural entity was, at best, shadowy. They  were too close to the political, religious and racial pressures that were  forming this entity to be able to give it a name. We must, therefore, take a  little time out to study the map of those lands where the slow but dramatic  metamorphosis was taking place. The Roman world had been centered on the  Mediterranean basin. As the triumphant armies of the Empire and the Republic  extended their sway farther and farther from their homeland, they applied  vague names to the hinterlands of those regions that remained largely  outside their permanent control. To the south, beyond Mare Nostrum, lay  Africa. Eastward, over the Hellespont, was Asia. The land on the far side of  the Alps bordered only by forbidding forest and the Atlantic world's edge  was Europa. The appearance of Christianity as a world religion that replaced  tribal and household gods gave the heterogeneous, overextended Roman state  what was no more than a semblance of cultural unity and greater political  stability, even after Constantine converted to the faith of the crucified  Jew.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUnder pressure of the barbarian invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries,  the Romano-Christian world contracted to the Mediterranean fringes and to  scattered monastic outposts, where men and women of prayer kept the sacred  flame of faith and learning flickering and planned the evangelization of  their pagan neighbors. Worse was to come in the shape of the Islamic  explosion. After the death of Mohammed in 632, his followers, aflame with  the zeal of their new faith and a passion for military conquest, surged in  all directions from their Arabian heartland. Within a century the  Mediterranean, once a Roman lake, was bordered by lands over which the  crescent flag flew. From Palestine, along the African littoral, across the  Strait of Gibraltar and on to the Pyrenees the champions of the new religion  advanced with a speed and success that dwarfed the earlier achievements of  Christianity. By the time that Charles, the eldest son of Pepin the Short,  was born in 742, the followers of the Cross were everywhere under pressure.  The once fiercely thriving North African Church had been obliterated. In the  East, the Muslim advance had been halted at the Taurus Mountains, but this  had not prevented military expeditions reaching the Bosporus in 673 and 717.  In the West, the seemingly inexorable triumph of Islamic arms had only been  checked by Pepin's father, Charles Martel, at the Battle of Poitiers in 732.  The Christianized transalpine tribes were between the hammer of an  aggressive Islam and the anvil of disparate pagan communities to the east  and northeast--Frisians, Saxons and Alemanni--who were themselves being  harassed by the westward-thrusting Slavs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs if that were not bad enough, the professional Church was in a perilous  state. Ever since Constantine had moved his capital to the Golden Horn, a  gulf had grown between the leaders of the Latin Church in Rome and the Greek  patriarchs of Byzantium. Since both priestly houses claimed unifying  authority, they effectively divided the Christian world. But that was only  one of several tears in the seamless robe of Christ. Throughout the Latin  half of the Church there was scant uniformity of either belief or practice.  Wherever mass conversions were achieved, they usually involved an element of  compromise with prevailing customs. Thus pagan and Christian symbols are  often found side by side in ancient burials. Some Germanic tribes had  actually embraced the old heresy of Arianism, outlawed at the Council of  Nicaea in 325, to demonstrate their independence from the pope. In 664 it  took a very acrimonious debate at the Synod of Whitby to induce the Celtic  Church to celebrate Easter on the same date as the \"mother\" Church in Rome.  Even where orthodoxy was impeccable, morality often was not. In a turbulent  age the authority of the clergy depended almost entirely on their education  and the purity of their lives. All too often they forfeited any influence  they might have enjoyed by ignorant and unbridled behavior. The peripatetic  Boniface expended more effort in disciplining adulterous monks and clerical  rapists than in bringing heathens to the baptismal font. A council at  Aix-la-Chapelle in 836 denounced certain convents for practicing infanticide  in order to dispose of the evidence of their inmates' sexual activities.  With all these internal weaknesses and external pressures, no betting man  would have wagered on the emergence from this threatened culture of a  world-conquering Christian civilization. That such a civilization did emerge  is thanks to three types of men: Celtic missionaries, Roman popes and  Frankish kings.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTwo religious currents--one from the north and one from the south--washed  over Francia. Celtic spirituality was, and is, a very distinctive strain of  religious experience. The conditions for its development and spread were  restricted in both space and time. Like a diamond formed under intense  pressure, it developed in a narrow cultural stratum sandwiched between the  ancient rock of Celtic paganism and the new deposits of Anglo-Saxon  paganism. The first native, British Christians built centers for the  exercise of their highly disciplined routines of worship and meditation in  the remoter parts of the remotest western province of what had been the  Roman Empire. In the white heat of a spiritual commitment that refused to be  obsessed with mere survival, they planned and launched ever more extensive  evangelistic crusades. This, the first experience of Britain at the heart of  Europe, was one of the most remarkable phases in the long history of  Christian missionary endeavor, and its legends ring with the names of such  heroes as Patrick, Columba, Aidan, Columban and Boniface. Most religious  revivals peter out after a few decades. This one lasted in full vigor for an  amazing four centuries, from the time when the last Roman conquerors  departed to the moment when the first Viking invaders arrived. It would be  impossible to overestimate the long-term effects of this religious  explosion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf we were to tease out from the multistranded life and teaching of these  Celtic men and women (for women contemplatives always featured significantly  within early British Christianity) a couple of features that help to explain  their success, we might choose ones that seem, on the face of it, mutually  contradictory. These saints manifested a strict puritanism allied with a  flexibility toward pagan beliefs. On the one hand, they locked themselves in  monastic \"fortresses\" such as Iona and Lindisfarne, where they could  practice their austerities undisturbed; on the other, they pledged  themselves to \u003ci\u003eperegrinatio\u003c\/i\u003e, wandering among strangers and unbelievers,  protected only by the \"breastplate\" of faith, adumbrated by Patrick's famous  hymn:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Christ be with me, Christ within me,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Christ behind me, Christ before me,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Christ beside me, Christ to win me,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Christ to comfort and restore me,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Christ beneath me, Christ above me,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Christ in hearts of all that love me,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLike itinerant holy men of all ages, the Celtic missionaries attracted  curiosity and admiration. Numerous miracles were attributed to them. Yet in  their preaching they did not exhort converts to commit themselves to the  kind of renunciation and asceticism they followed themselves. They did not  even demand unquestioning adherence to every tenet of Christian dogma and  ethics.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne reason why Christianity has been the most successful of all world  religions in crossing cultural boundaries is its adaptability. To be sure,  this has not been manifested in all places and at all times. Some missionary  endeavors have been based on the premise that any rival belief system is of  the devil and must be totally obliterated. Contrariwise, there have been  occasions when, for the sake of number crunching, religious fundamentals  have been sacrificed. On the whole, however, wise evangelists have  understood not only that the Gospel may be garbed in a variety of national  costumes but that incorporating fresh customs and thought patterns actually  enriches the life of new churches.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCeltic Christianity was itself an indigenous expression of \"the faith once  given\" and not a carbon copy of the church life of Rome. Some of its customs  were sharply at variance with what was culturally acceptable in Italy. It  had married clergy and permitted women an active role in the  liturgy--something anathema south of the Alps. Its organization focused on  monastic cells rather than territorial dioceses. In fact, \"organization\" was  scarcely a word in the vocabulary of these Celtic monks. They were dynamic  missionaries, pilgrimaging throughout this world on their way to heaven.  They had little time or inclination for establishing power bases.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEvangelistic strategy motivated their interaction with the prevailing  cultures. They had found ways to mediate Christianity in terms that were  deeply meaningful to the nature-worshipping instincts of their own and other  people. Their pagan ancestors had made offerings to the gods of mountain  spring and oaken grove, had prayed to the spirits residing in the animals  they hunted and the plants they gathered for their healing properties. Men  of the new faith, like St. Patrick, found ways to express their beliefs that  were acceptable to a people living close to nature, without capitulating to  pantheism:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOur God is the God of all men, the God of heaven and earth, of sea and  river, of sun and moon and stars, of the lofty mountain and the lowly valley  . . . He has his dwelling around heaven and earth and sea and all that in  them is. He inspires all, he quickens all, he dominates all, he sustains all  . . .(3)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was in the scriptoria of the Celtic monasteries that the old sagas were  written down for the first time and preserved alongside the Christian  Scriptures and the lives of the saints. And the most familiar of all  expressions of Celtic art, the great stone crosses, were a continuation of  an ancient custom of erecting standing monuments carved with the symbols of  the old religion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhile independent of power structures, the Celtic Christians could not avoid  the realities of tribal government. Not only did they commend themselves to  their own people and those of neighboring tribes by empathizing with their  veneration of the mysteries of creation but they taught that their God was  also interested in politics:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTassilo, duke of the Bavarians . . . commended himself into vassalage with  his lands, and swore innumerable oaths. Touching the relics of the saints,  he promised fealty to King Pepin and his sons Charles and Carloman, behaving  honestly and faithfully, in accordance with the law and as a vassal should  to his lords. Tassilo thus swore on the bodies of St. Dionysius, Rusticus,  Eleutherius, St. Germanus, and St. Martin that he would remain faithful all  his life . . .(4)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJust as the spirits, whether pagan or Christian, manifested themselves  through the physical universe, so they also did through the ordering of  society. The hierarchy, like Jacob's ladder, extended from earth to heaven.  At its base were slaves and landless peasants. From them one ascended  through the ranks of warriors, aristocrats and princes to the domain of the  shining ones--heroes and ancestors or, in the Christian pantheon, saints and  angels thronging the throne room of the triune God. Theologians, preachers  and artists presented the court of Christ the King in terms of the splendor  of earthly monarchs, and the splendor of earthly monarchs in terms of the  court of Christ the King. There was a mysterium about human sovereignty  which paralleled that of divine majesty. In ancient Celtic political theory,  the king was charged by the gods with responsibility for the well-being of  his people and endowed with magical powers to support his dignity and  authority. Just as he received fealty from his vassals, so he paid homage to  his spiritual superiors. This thinking was very easily Christianized. Thus,  in those lands that fell under the influence of British missionaries, kings  were conceived of as holding a divine mandate and being responsible to God  alone for its execution.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301863772389,"sku":"NP9780307274809","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307274809.jpg?v=1767723569","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/charlemagne-isbn-9780307274809","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}